Encryption For All Sponsored by German Govt.

fiffilinus writes: "The German Ministry of Economics uses the CeBIT computer fair as a forum to propagate its GnuPP (Gnu Privacy Project -- I know, it is *not* GPG, but GPG is part of the package) encryption package to the public, giving away CD-roms with the package. The CeBIT press release can be found here. The download for those who can't make it to CeBIT is here. The package is available in English too, but the page itself has to be put through the fish, as usual. Finally a government that moves in the right direction ..."

Comments

Re:But what's their motive?

[Genghis Troll]

If these German citizens have done nothing wrong, then they have nothing to worry about when the US government snoops on them.

Germany must have learned some lessons

[CodeWheeney]

This article made me laugh as I thought of the fact that one of the main reasons the allies in WW II were able to decript and read Enigma traffic was that the Nazis were convinced that it was unbreakable. Germany is learning a lesson from history and going with a reviewable protocol and implementation, it would seem. Then again, human factors played an important role in breaking Enigma, and I would figure similar poor use of even modern cryptography could lead folks of an intellect similar to those who broke enigma to break selected PGP, GnuPP traffic.

That also makes me wanna quote Vizzini from the Princess Bride: "Inconceivable". I wonder if the German high command ever had that thought.

Man Encryption -> Nazis -> Princess Bride. I didn't get enough sleep.